Just wondered if we could start a thread on how to make interesting and controlled random patterns/sounds. Following a brief quiz with Jan on the subject yesterday, he advised me to post something up on here n see how u all do it.

I have managed to get my head round quite a lot of the sound synthesis aspects of the Nord but I am struggling with the evolving concepts (such as complex arrangements of logic n sequencers), i find i am having to do the leg work with controllers, rather than getting the nord to do the labour.

A couple of pics below: 1st one is a really basic couple of controlled random modules, the lfo one, is quite cool cos u can get it to make repeatable random seqs rather than usinhg the random pattern module.

Ross, could you post the patches as well ? Would save me some time in copying

To me the sequencer approach usually does not work out very well, as it keeps on looping around forever doing the same. It doesn't even matter very much how long the sequences are, after a few loops it will be obvious anyway.

What I sometimes do to get some life in itis to set some of the loop lengths to odd numbers like 11 or 13. Usually the sequencer reset is tied to the clock's sync output and you can play a bit with when things get synced.

Alternatively some post processing could be used, either on the looped control signals or on the audio signals resulting from it.

On the other hand, plain random doesn't do the trick either, there has to be some order to make it attractive.

It's a bit hard to be specific about this as basically I just try stuff till I'm pleased by the results. To illustrate I'll add an example patch that I made based on this thread. I picked this one because it's a relativly simple patch.

This a a bit of a funny way of turning things around, the basic sequence is a random one, but when it would play the same note an alternative selection is used. The funny thing is that altough I would have expected the output to be more random instead a new order seems to be imposed by the switching process itself. A sort of a lucky find.

Especially look at the Mandelbrot and fractal patches. These have a knack of sounding repetitive but never repeating exactly.

After a lot of study with these, I find it is difficult to understand intuitively, but just use them as pattern generators and forget about understanding them. _________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

It's one thing to get these nice sequences, but if the rhythm is ignored, then it just sounds like a note generator spiting out notes on every beat. I'm interested in rhythm generators too._________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

Here's a variation of Jan's patch. I added a rhythm trick. I use event sequencers and a random selector. So at any clock tick, there is about a 25% chance that a given event sequence will fire. By selecting a beat on all four selectors, you are going to get 100% notes on that beat. So you can sorta control the probability of each one of the 16 beats.

autorhythm.pch2

Description:

A simple patch for generation an automatic rhythm of some interest. Based on a melody generator by Blue Hell. The rhythm part is the 4 modules on the lower left.

I like to experiment with a couple of pre-made patterns that get randomly selected by a mux. Here is something I knocked together to show the principle (with a static drum line and bass note) - I would probably tweak it some more.

For the melody line there are no pre-made patterns, rather one of 8 different values are selected by the mux (the purple modules) for each note, the selections are random values, the bass line, the bass line offset by 7 half notes, the fourth or sixth latest note (taken from the delay shift register), or the mean value of the last and the seventh last note.

Edit: Noticed that my pattern thingie is a slightly different take on Mosc's rythm generator.

Thanks Ross, but the point is: get rid of those sequencers, they are boring and they are not needed ... well it depends on what music you want to make of course, but they are over-used and over-rated IMHO

The patch above uses a bunch of LFO's with feedback. In this case, to get something of a steady pace, in it I used sample & holds to sync the outputs to a clock, The amount of feedback used, together with the speed of the LFO's determines an amount of randomness vs staticness. Putting slow random LFO's on that to modulate it gives some variation over time. When you want it to be more messy leave out the synching.

Here is a tribal-like variation, same idea as above. anyway, you can make it as nuts as you like, or tame it instead.

In the above I might have given the suggestion of saying bad things about other's patches. This was not my intention, I just wanted to stress other possibilities and got carried away in that a bit. I found all contributions here useful and interesting.

Please keep on posting your patches, without other's ideas I'd run around in circles as well._________________Jan

In the above I might have given the suggestion of saying bad things about other's patches. This was not my intention, I just wanted to stress other possibilities and got carried away in that a bit. I found all contributions here useful and interesting.

Please keep on posting your patches, without other's ideas I'd run around in circles as well.

Don't worry. No bad intention came through. Sequencers have their uses and I agree, they tend to be over used. When it comes to "variations on a theme" techniques, they are very handy._________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

Here's something that I've been working on for the last year or so. This is NM specific. I think there is considerable value in making note generators in one slot that control sound generators in other slots. This keeps the process of generation and sound separate._________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

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